National Research Council Calls for
National Digital Archive
A new report examining intellectual-property issues in the online era recommends that policymakers create a system of electronic depositories to preserve digital information for archival purposes.
The 240-page report from the National Research Council, titled The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age, also suggests that a task force be formed to resolve the many legal, economic, and technical questions that large-scale electronic archiving would raise. It further proposes that Congress should enact legislation to permit copying digital information for preservation.
The call for an “e-archive” will be taken seriously, said Ed McDonald, chief of staff for Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.), chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property. “Right now, we have depositories for hard volumes . . . but we don’t have any kinds of depositories for bits and bytes. I think that’s something that Congress will have to look at in the future,” he told MSNBC.
Posted November 8, 1999.
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